IN THE FILM adaptation of "A Map of the World," Alice Goodwin (Sigourney Weaver)

is a mother who has cleaned the Cap'n Crunch off the kitchen floor one too many mornings. She's a wife who's been forced daily to hum that "Barney" song while her hubby (David Strathairn) lives his dream of being a dairy farmer. She's a school nurse given less respect than the lunch lady.

Dreary, yes, but it gets worse. Soon she's in the Racine County jail with a cast of characters including an obese racist roommate, an imposing black girl with cornrows who wants her to "be her bitch," and a sewing circle of sanity-addled prisoners fiending for their afternoon Oprah fix. Alice has found her Wonderland, consigned there by a kid's accusation that she has done something awful. (Chloe Sevigny plays the boy's mother in hissy gutter-rat mode.)

Like a cable channel

For all the blathering, heavy-handed pathos, we might as well be watching the Lifetime cable channel. Director Scott Elliott has a penchant for adding fabric softener: He has Weaver playing Alice like a wild animal roving the clich landscapes of a TV movie. The heaped-on horror started when, while in Alice's care, the young daughter of her best friend, Theresa (Julianne Moore, weeping her patented dry-heave), strays from the Goodwin house and down to their lake, where she drowns.

Most of the film feels borrowed from other movies - from the drowning scene in "Don't Look Now" to Midwest pastorals like

"Places in the Heart." The emotion feels borrowed, too. What complexity there is in "Map of the World" comes courtesy of Weaver's acting - she doesn't look like a Hollywood mother, but plays one of those harried, overworked women you see fighting to get the child-seat safety bar over her kid's head. You wouldn't put it past her to eat her young - and with the annoying child-acting on display here, you wouldn't blink if she did. It's a weird catharsis, but since Alice is the only plausible, emotionally/psychologically detailed figure here, you find yourself rooting for her jarring wish to stay locked up. Grief doesn't just strike her; it sublets her face and doesn't move out until she's in that county jail jumpsuit. When Weaver's not cracking up, she looks like she

wants to.

Keeps the humor

There's something foreign about Alice's disinterest in being seen as a good mother in the eyes of her bucolic Wisconsin town. But like Meryl Streep's inscrutable Lindy Chamberlain in the similar but far more competent "A Cry in the Dark," Weaver's Alice never sacrifices her sense of humor, practically seducing us by baring her id. ("Sometimes I don't even like her," she confesses to Theresa about her own daughter.) Prison is a vacation for her. Contrary to mother-daughter fantasies like "Tumbleweeds," the deeply unfashionable idea at the heart of Weaver's performance is that Alice enjoys knowing her husband, Howard, is struggling to take care of himself and the kids.

has been adapted by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt into a movie that wants to be as tough and ambivalent as Weaver's Alice. It even warps Hamilton's allegiance to Oprah, who was the book's patron saint. When Alice says to her lawyer (Arliss Howard) about her fate, "Let's take it to Oprah - let the studio audience decide," you're not sure the movie knows what to do with Weaver's sarcasm. It doesn't help that Elliott makes movies the way that Strathairn's timid Howard does laundry - like a virgin.